


the fifteen steps between here and there

by Xalts



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 19:11:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15443895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xalts/pseuds/Xalts
Summary: In November, it snows in Gotham City.Jason Todd has just been stabbed.





	the fifteen steps between here and there

_i._

The blood that seeps between his fingers is strangely warm, and it takes a few worryingly confusing minutes for him to realise that’s because his hands are getting colder and colder. He freezes, his mind trapped in the juxtaposition between the glove and where its palm is ripped off completely, leather giving way to skin, and pressed against the wound on his stomach.

It shouldn’t have gotten this far. He’d thrown himself too deep and now, the last anyone would hear of him would be here, in this dirty alleyway in the backstreets of the Bowery. He sighs out a breath and watches it condense in the air in front of him.

The temperature has dropped. It’s snowing in Gotham City.

 

_ii._

When Jason Todd was six years old, he saw someone die for the first time.

He hadn’t understood it at the time, of course. All he saw was someone falling asleep and then not waking up. It happened often, when his mother had ‘friends’ around - they’d talk, drink, smoke, and then do something that Catherine Todd always made sure Jason couldn’t see, and after that they’d lay around lifelessly for hours on end.

To a child who knew no better, that was what adults did. He didn’t think anything of it until much later, when his mother clumsily lifted herself upwards and shook the other people’s shoulders, waking them up, and then one man took so much more shaking than anyone else that she started to panic. She shouted a lot, then grabbed Jason off the mattress in the corner and left the apartment.

They sat in the hallway for a long time. She didn’t answer his questions. Some men in uniforms came and took the body away. Jason didn’t know what he’d seen, but he remembered the panic.

 

_iii._

It would have been better if the knife was still in there, he thinks. That’s what you’re supposed to do - leave the knife in the wound, and then it bleeds less. But it had been in and out faster than he’d noticed, and he hadn’t even felt the pain until three men had fallen with bullets in their skulls.

He wonders if he could put a different knife in and it would work the same. No, that was stupid. Probably. He wonders if he has enough strength to get up. It’s not too far to Leslie’s clinic from here, but one experimental push against the floor has pain ricocheting through his chest and shoulder until he can barely see through it.

He lays back down on the ground and wonders who’s on patrol tonight.

 

_iv._

When Jason Todd was nine years old, he stole a solid gold watch.

It was a crime of opportunity; a well-dressed man, stinking of old money, on the wrong side of the tracks, asking for directions, and him on the other side of the supermarket aisle, stuffing his pockets with shoplifted snacks in one of the store's three CCTV blind spots. The man was distracted, agitated -- it had taken all of a second for Jason to reach through one of the displays and deftly flip the clasp, the watch falling silently into a bin of chips packets, and then he'd loitered for another three minutes until the man left and he could collect his prize.

He hadn't recognised it's true worth. He was happy with the sixty bucks the pawn shop offered him. He bought his mother a new coat.

 

_v._

_(Desperation had always had one hand coiled around Jason’s throat. He was intimately familiar with it by now.)_

 

_vi._

His helmet is too far away to reach. It had skittered across the cobbles when a blow from behind had popped the latch. A stupid mistake, one he should have checked for before he’d put it on, but it was too late to ruminate on that now. He reaches up to his ear and imagines he has a line to the Cave. Imagines someone answering his call.

It hurts to breathe. There’s a pressure building in his chest that suggests something might be leaking somewhere that it shouldn’t be, and the ache in his gut is alternating between sharp and dull. Snowflakes keep landing on his face and melting into his eyes, but he can’t spare a hand to wipe them away.

He might die again tonight. A part of him, one that he tries not to listen to often, is very excited about that prospect.

 

_vii._

_(Other, louder parts are terrified. Those are the ones he listens to most of the time.)_

 

_viii._

Therapy had been mandatory in Arkham.

Arkham itself had been Bruce’s idea. Apparently even being related to the Bat wasn’t enough to keep you out of the asylum. Meals twice a day, one hour of exercise in a yard flanked by snipers and one mandatory therapy session per week, minimum.

Jason had had four sessions. Most of them were spent in steely silence while Dr Quinzel asked prying questions and tried desperately to engage him in conversation. The last session, Dr Quinzel had put down her clipboard and looked him in the face.

“Look, I know I’m the last person to be lecturing you about this stuff,” she’d said in her thick accent. “But we’ve both been messed up by the same guy, you know? An’ if I can get my life back on track, sorta, then so can you, you know? You just gotta give yourself a chance!”

He hadn’t replied. Two days later, Bruce pulled him out.

Four weeks and five days. Apparently enough punishment for the eighteen deaths Batman had linked to the Red Hood. Maybe there was a heart under that cape after all.

 

_ix._

When Jason Todd was twenty years old, he stole a motorbike.

He didn’t know why he’d come back to the Cave. He had nebulous ideas floating around in his mind about thanking Bruce for any number of things, or even of just coming home, if he could still call the Manor home.

It had been a surprise that his five-year-old access codes still worked. With the hatch open, he could see the vehicle storage stretching into the darkness - huge jets and boats lurking in the shadows, cars and quad bikes covering the bulk of the area, and at the front, a neat row of customised motorbikes in splashes of red, green, blue.

He picked a big black one that he knew was one of Bruce’s favourites. The keys were in the ignition. It was too easy.

He rode it around the city streets for five hours, thinking that if anyone was tracking it, they’d ask where he was going. Then he abandoned it in a drainage ditch and walked an hour to his safehouse on foot.

 

_x._

Last time, he hadn’t had a chance to prepare. No one thinks about writing a will when they’re fifteen. The opportunity now is frustrating, because he doesn’t have a pen on him.

Well, it’s not as though he has a lot of stuff to bequeath to anyone. Most of what he owns is job-related, so it’d probably end up in the Cave - though if it ends up on display in a glass case, he’ll be pretty pissed. Everything else was junk. A fourth-hand couch and a handful of video games. Nothing sentimental he could pass down.

What else needed to be taken care of? Funeral arrangements? He’ll leave that to someone else. It’d probably be the same as last time there. An obituary? He always thought it was narcissistic to write your own. Maybe Bruce could break out the same speech he used last time.

If there had been a speech. Honestly, he’d never asked about his last funeral. It always seemed too morbid.

He can’t feel his hands anymore. The snow just keeps coming.

 

_xi._

_(The coldest November in Gotham history, they’ll say later. They don’t count the times it’s been caused by a villain.)_

 

_xii._

Jason had tried, many a time, to put into words the effect the Lazarus Pit had had on him, but it always felt like a cop-out, to blame his actions on something beyond his control.

He didn’t know much about the events leading to his immersion, only what Talia had told him, and even those words were often lost in the fog that had descended in his mind as soon as he’d become awake and aware once more. Like his soul had returned to his body, she had described it as.

All he knew was that the fog felt like rage, pure and searing, bubbling beneath his skin and driving him to act, and each action felt like betrayal, over and over until he couldn’t have been sure that he had planned anything or if it was just impulsive stabs in the dark that managed to somehow make contact with what he’d intended.

It was an excuse. It didn’t justify any of it. And every day, the fog was easier to climb out of, and one day it wouldn’t be there at all, and then he’d be able to breathe freely again.

 

_xiii._

“Aw geez, Jay, what happened?”

He can barely open his eyes, but of course he recognises the voice. He’ll ask later why Nightwing’s in Gotham, but for now, the relief coursing through him is almost physical.

“Stabbed,” he manages to mutter, tasting the electric copper tang of blood across his tongue and half-heartedly attempting to swallow it down.

“Give me the long version later. Think you’ll last to the Cave?”

Leslie’s is closer, they both know, but he still nods, something light in his throat at the prospect of going _home_. He lets himself be lifted, too weak to be anything but dead weight. The ground he leaves behind, he knows, will be blood-soaked and dirty with slush, but by morning, when the snow melts, it’ll all be gone.

He won’t be.

 

_xiv._

_(Later, Dick won’t mention the dead men, and Bruce won’t ask.)_

 

_xv._

He’s still a work in progress. He knows it takes so much more effort than he can give. But he lets Alfred dress his wounds, and lets Tim take over his case, and lets Damian awkwardly hand over the helmet he’d retrieved from the alley, and he lets Bruce hover in his doorway as he pretends to be asleep, knowing that there’s too much to say between the pair of them and that none of it will be said.

And he’s thankful for them.


End file.
